thehardtimes

Hard Digest April 28: Early Access Real Punks, Cancel Culture, TikTok, and More

Added 2024-04-29 00:00:05 +0000 UTC

Punk Can’t Decide if They Should Be the Kind of Punk That Knows a Lot About Government or Jack Shit

MINNEAPOLIS — Local man Brian Meddleson, a 20-year-old who has recently gotten into punk music, is openly debating on whether he will be a ‘don’t give a shit’ type of punk or the ‘really gives a shit about everything’ kind, sources close to the man confirmed.

“I noticed that a lot of punk bands had political themes in their songs and it made me want to get involved and help make a change. I started learning what fascism was and its history, but then when I described what I was learning to people I sounded like an eighth-grade teacher trying to seem cool,” said Meddleson. “So that made me gravitate towards the punk music that was just about getting drunk, doing drugs, and shoplifting. But having to smoke cigarettes I found on the ground made me feel sick all the time, so I’m really struggling to find where I belong in the punk sphere.”

A friend of Meddleson’s described his flip-flopping of punk identity.

“It went from Brian saying kind of cool shit like how the system was rigged and how much money the government gave rich people to him researching the emancipation of the serfs,” said Jake Weller. “He sounded like a total nerd. He would go on and on about the government’s involvement in the drug trade and I felt like I needed to take notes for a test. Then the next week he would be so high from sniffing paint fumes he couldn’t remember his name and kept talking in a fake British accent, I sort of regret introducing him to punk, he was more tolerable when he was into ska.”

According to psychologist Susan Miller, Brian’s oscillation between identities is a recognizable pattern that occurs in communities that are critical of the mainstream.

“There’s no specific term but it’s basically an ‘all or nothing’ philosophy. You’ll see it in activist communities or with vegan subcultures,” said Miller. “You will have some vegans that insist on showing you terrible videos of pigs being slaughtered, or baby chicks being ground into a paste. The opposite end is the vegans who just do it for health reasons and couldn’t care less about animal suffering. They are similar on the surface, but very different at their core.”

At press time, Meddleson had already moved on from his punk phase and was found attending a DND marathon listening to Rhapsody and Dragon Force.

We Regret to Inform You That Tallahassee Bob’s Child Casino and Discount Fireworks Emporium is Closing Due to Cancel Culture

BY MATT HUSSER

Tallahassee Bob here, and it’s with a heavy heart that I have to announce that my beloved Child Casino and Discount Fireworks Emporium will be closing down effective immediately due to the out-of-control climate of censorship in our once-great country. That’s right, the woke left finally released their hounds and tore down this renowned adolescent gambling and explosives institution for literally no reason.

Four years ago, I used a PPP loan to convert a decommissioned fallout shelter into the nation’s premier child casino. All I wanted to do was provide a safe place where kids could still be kids and unwind after a long day of public school indoctrination with some good ol’ fashioned high stakes blackjack away from the prying eyes of the US government. And when I was approached by an exiled Uzbekistani General selling hundreds of shipping containers filled with surplus fireworks, I knew it was a sign from God to start selling family-friendly munitions to these precious kids at an allowance-friendly discount. Children traveled from all over this great nation to visit my gambling playground, I was making a tidy profit, and everyone was happy. But unfortunately in today’s woke political environment, it’s apparently illegal to run a successful business.

It’s a known fact that the children yearn for the craps tables, and the free market demands that someone fills that need—if I didn’t, then some foreign Chinese app like TikTok would. But basic economics didn’t stop those money-hating commies on the left from calling in their alphabet boys at the DEA, ATF, FBI, and CPS to do their dirty work and shut me down. Hell, if you ask me, that’s a whole lot of letters when the real culprit only has three—DEI.

Soon the liberal media’s witch hunt will start spinning lies about armed skirmishes with Mexican cartels, and the napalm incident that abruptly ended our Wiggles residency. They’ll say I used child labor, when in reality I was an adolescent job creator. The Girl Scouts can use kids to hock their Thin Mints, but I can’t have highly qualified nine-year-olds work off their gambling debts and pick up valuable job training in the process? Liberal hypocrisy at its finest.

In closing, I hope that this tragedy can serve as a cautionary tale —if wokeness can topple something as All-American as my child gambling and fireworks empire, they won’t stop until they cancel the American dream, too.

Shazam to Add Feature That Tells User Whether It’s Okay to Like That Song

BY ARIELLE ANDREANO

LONDON — Ubiquitous music identification app, Shazam, announced the release of a feature that will help users identify whether that song they were excited to discover is considered cool or in fact total dog shit, multiple sources confirmed.

“It’s a pretty big deal over here, we haven’t really added any new features for the past 21 years so we are all buzzing. Usually we’re just like, ‘Yeah, it’s this song,’ and then we call it a day,” said CEO Rich Riley. “We had the entire staff pulling 8-hour workdays for the first time in our lives cataloging everything into ‘Cool’ and ‘Totally Uncool.’I mean our Cool Music Experts did all the cataloging but we had to get them drugs and snacks and stuff. I really hope they like us.”

Shazam users are expressing their passionate excitement for the change.

“This is taking us back to the old days, man. We used to get our music info from our friend’s cool burnout older brother, and he’d roast the hell out of you if he saw you wearing some mall-core punk band shirt,” said avid Shazamer Jayme Ring. “It was something you could trust to keep you from getting punched in the face. Nowadays, you hear a song that lights you up, you Shazam it, and then you’re overwhelmed by the sudden realization that maybe everyone already knows the band totally sucks as. But not anymore.”

Icons in the music industry have been sharing their thoughts as well. When asked how he felt about the change, Sir Paul McCartney wasn’t shy at all.

“You can’t modernize everything. Music isn’t about an app telling you what’s cool. It’s about your drug connect telling you that your last album totally wasn’t cool. It’s about your unemployed cousin telling you what’s going on at shows in the alleys behind dive bars,” said McCartney. “We can’t let these tech companies be the people in charge of what is cool. Have you ever met a remotely cool tech worker? They are all a bunch of wankers in windbreakers that slowly destroy culture. But I do hope they put my music in the cool column, especially the stuff with Wings, that stuff was cool.”

Shazam says it is now working on adding brief song bios that will explain the history of the song’s coolness or corniness, complete with a timeline on discourse and quotes from registered cool people about the song.